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Great Plains, Great Books: Riot and Remembrance: The Tulsa Race War and Its Legacy

July 31, 2007

Author: Hirsch, James S.
Published: Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002.
A forbidden subject for decades, Tulsa's 1921 racial bloodletting has recently become the subject of several books, some better than others but none quite like this one. The reason is that the author is concerned equally with two related yet ultimately different things. The first involves what happened (and why) during a few horrible hours in a Tulsa of long ago. The second ponders how Tulsans, both black and white, have so differently remembered and understood what happened. In this telling, those differences are at least as revealing as the event itself.